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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Farewell to Bullets Across the Bay

Farewell to Bullets Across the Bayby Randal Brandt

To celebrate the conclusion of the popular exhibit, Bullets Across the Bay: The San Francisco Bay Area in Crime Fiction, the Library at the University of California, Berkeley is holding a closing reception on Friday, February 24, 2012 from 6:00-8:00pm in the Morrison Library. The reception is co-sponsored by Mystery Writers of America, NorCal Chapter and Sisters in Crime, Northern California Chapter and will be open to the campus community and the general public. The program will feature five local mystery authors—Mark Coggins, Janet Dawson, Diana Orgain, Sheldon Siegel, and Simon Wood—reading selections from their favorite Bay Area crime and detective novels, followed by an opportunity for audience members to engage the readers and exhibit curators in Questions and Answers.

Bullets Across the Bay exposes the richness of the University Library collections for the study of detective narrative and genre fiction set in the San Francisco Bay Area. From 19th-century dime novels to today’s bestsellers, the exhibit features examples of novels both iconic and obscure that provide commentary on topics such as cultural diversity and historical events represented in popular literature. It also highlights resources for the academic study of the mystery genre and chronicles the careers and influence of some of the titans of the Bay Area mystery scene: Dashiell Hammett, Anthony Boucher, Marcia Muller, and Bill Pronzini—as well as the work of many other authors whose writing contributes to the richness of fiction on either side of the Bay Bridge.

The exhibit is on display in the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery through February 29, 2012. It is free and open to the public during the operating hours of Doe Library.

Randal S. Brandt is a librarian at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. He is the creator of Golden Gate Mysteries, an annotated bibliography of crime fiction set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and one of the co-curators of Bullets Across the Bay.